Contents

Parallel Anthology

Friday 30 July, 8pm - 11pm

Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High Street
London E1 7QX

An evening of music inspired by musicologist, record collector and artist Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. Simpson and White have collected parallel public domain versions of the anthology recordings not closed down by copyright - from non-attributed folk versions, to commercial recordings whose proprietary interests have expired. For this event musicians and producers have been invited to perform covers and remixes of Parallel Anthology for a night of plugged and unplugged performances.

Background

The 1952 release of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American
Folk Music was a compilation bringing together a selection of
Smith’s personal collection of 78rpm records. As such, it was
effectively a bootleg and operated under the legal radar until it
was digitised, re-mastered and fully licensed in 1997.

The recordings in the anthology are those from the early days
of the record industry, a time which saw the establishment of a
system that fixed collectively-authored folk lyrics and melodies
to individual authors in an attempt to control the flow of this
previously fluid cultural material.

The Parallel Anthology project aims to map the public/private
territory of Smith’s anthology and to scrutinize different levels
of access to the material – researching details of future dates
when compositions will enter the public domain, sourcing
alternative versions of recordings, and gathering together
fragments of archive manuscripts and lyrics.

Parallel Anthology volume 1 begins the process of collecting
together alternative versions of tracks and makes available a
small selection of public domain versions not closed down by
copyright. Future volumes will collect, publish and distribute
recordings whose proprietary interests have expired, along with
new versions and remixes of the material collected.

The project re-envisages Smith’s anthology as a series of nodes
in a larger network and employs a kind of sonic virology –
tracing songs across spatial and temporal distances.

A parallel collection is proposed: a new roots and future
anthology, distributing rich material that remains open
for use and reuse.